Despicable Me
This review comes from our sister site, Crazy Kids Chicago.
Great summer movies continue to roll on. On the heels of Toy Story 3 and Train Your Dragon, I went to the opening day of Despicable Me with my son. Despicable Me is an animated feature with voices from Steve Carrell as Gru, the evil villian main character, Russell Brand as the mad scientist Dr. Nefario, and Jason Segal as Vector, the new bad guy in town. The cartoon is rated PG because of some fart jokes and sly one liners, but nothing I couldn’t take my 5 year old to.
The general gist of the story is Gru, a master villian, is getting on in years and he may not be the top villian in the world anymore. When he hears that someone stole one of the pyramids (Vector) of Egypt he gets fired up and wants to pull the greatest caper in the world. That caper is his life long dream of stealing (or at least going to) the moon. To help him out is Dr. Nefario, the crazy mad scientist who is a little hard of hearing and his minions; both of whom live in his basement. The minions may be the best part of the story. They are little oval, weeble shaped creatures who have one eye, don’t speak English but just squeak at each other, and slap each other around when they do things wrong. Every scene with these sparks giggles.
Stealing the moon has its challenges though. First, its expensive. So you have to get a loan from the Evil Bank. The Evil Bank is really into Gru’s plan but integral to that plan is a shrink ray gun that will allow him to carry the moon like a bowling ball. The loan is his if he can produce the shrink ray gun. The heist for the shrink ray gun goes flawlessly until Vector comes in and steals the gun from him. No gun, no loan.
So Gru must steal the gun back, and of course, the best way to do that is to adopt three girls who will sell cookies to Vector which will allow his cookie robots to steal the gun back. This plan goes well and the shrink ray is his but the bank still refuses him the loan. Which is where the real story comes in. The girls donate their cookie money and the minions donate their salaries to build a rocket and finance the project.
The movie is really about how these girls soften Gru and confuse him on which is more important, the girls or being evil. There are great scenes where the girls ask for kisses goodnight (”No kisses for anyone”), want him to read them a book (”This book about kittens is horrible”), or tuck them in. No matter how nasty he is to them, they refuse to give up on him and keep being nice to him. He starts to enjoy cooking them breakfast, seeing them dance, and teaching them things. He is very disturbed when the heist for the moon is on the same day as their dance recital. When he tries to make the recital after the heist, he sees a note from Vector that they have been kidnapped.
Despicable Me is really a dark comedy for kids and they pull it off. The one liners are funny, Gru is shaped ridiculously (huge chest and head with tiny legs). They do some standard fart jokes, but there are a lot of slapstick with the minions, and the scenes with the girls keep getting funnier. The ending scene of Gru dancing to the Bee Gees is a perfect ending and he actually writes his own kids book so the kids can get used to real literature. Steve Carrel speaks in some sort of eastern European accent which caused the kids some difficulty at first, but it doesn’t last long. Escape the heat or at the first sign of rain, go see Despicable Me.
